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balto
839 Posts |
 Posted - 02/08/2013 : 20:20:23
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Disclaimer: I post this for entertainment purpose only. Please don't assume I believe or not believe in it. Please do not make nasty or hostile comment. thanks.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/6521361/Is-Jack-Sullivan-proof-that-miracles-really-can-happen.html
Is Jack Sullivan proof that miracles really can happen?
A 71 year-old American's cure from a severe spinal condition is being proclaimed as an Act of God. Even his doctor says so. Jonathan Wynne-Jones reports.
Lying in a hospital bed in Boston, Massachusetts, barely able to lift his head, Jack Sullivan was in such pain he was struggling to breathe.
There had been complications with the operation on his back. Doctors had warned that he would be left paralysed unless he underwent surgery, but on opening him up they discovered his spine had been so severely ruptured that protective fluids had leaked out.
Devastated and desperate, his hopes and plans for the future fading, Sullivan prayed to Cardinal Newman. He had turned to Newman after once watching a documentary about the Anglican cleric who had converted to Roman Catholicism in the 19th century, finding his life inspiring.
Almost immediately, the pain disappeared and he felt a surge of strength in his body. Pulling back the sheets, he tentatively felt for the floor with his toes – and then walked upright for the first time in months.
A Boston hospital might be an unlikely setting for one of Catholicism’s most significant events of the past decade, yet his healing has been hailed as a miracle by the Church. It has prompted the first papal visit to the UK for 28 years and paved the way for Britain’s first saint since 1982.
This week, Sullivan begins a tour of England, following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman, the cardinal he turned to in his darkest hour. He has been invited here by the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, who believes that the American’s visit is an important antidote to growing scepticism in Britain around issues of faith.
“His presence and testimony will help us to understand more deeply the power of prayer and the importance of intercession to those who can pray for us in the presence of God,” says the archbishop.
It is set to ignite a debate between those who consider miracles to be little more than figments of superstitious and confused minds, and those who firmly believe that they are the work of God.
In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Sullivan concedes that there will be many who doubt his claims – even his wife was initially unconvinced – but hopes that others will be encouraged by his story.
“For some heavenly reason, I was selected. I don’t know why, because I’m not unusual in any way. I’m just an average guy,” he says.
A chief magistrate at Plymouth District Court in Massachusetts, the 71-year-old has become living proof to millions of Catholics that miracles can happen to anyone, anywhere.
His debilitating back problems began in 2000, when a CT scan revealed a succession of spinal disc and vertebrae deformities, compressing the spinal cord and nerves and causing stenosis, an abnormal narrowing of the blood vessels, in his legs.
At the time he was training to become a deacon in the Catholic Church and was deeply upset that he would be unable to finish the course. Hunched over in his armchair at home, struggling to come to terms with his plight, he stopped flicking through the television channels to watch a documentary on Newman.
Feeling compelled to pray to the cardinal, he asked for the courage to confront his challenges and to somehow overcome his disability so that he could become a deacon.
The following morning he awoke virtually free from pain and able to walk, leaving doctors baffled. Scans had shown signficant problems with his spine.
“I continued to pray to Newman every day after that. I was so grateful. I couldn’t believe what had happened.”
Having been told by doctors that the bulges on his spine were no longer visible on X-rays, Sullivan experienced further pain the following year, forcing him to undergo surgery.
It was his healing from this operation, in 2001, which surgeons had told him would take months of recovery, that was this year confirmed by the Catholic Church as a miracle.
Sullivan says there can be no other explanation. “I had been in agony for days. The expectation was that I’d be unable to walk for a long time, if at all, but after I prayed to Newman I immediately felt an intense heat. I felt joy and confidence.
“I said to the nurse that the pain had gone. I then walked up and down the corridors, with the nurse struggling to keep up with me.”
Discharged from hospital the same day, he returned home where he sat down to write to the Birmingham Oratory. His letter set in motion a long and complicated process that only finished this summer, when Pope Benedict XVI decreed that what had happened could only be explained as a miracle. The announcement was made in a formal proclamation by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican department responsible for examining claims of a cure.
There is none of the frenzied celebrations whipped up by “televangelists”, who cry that a miracle has occurred as they lay hands on believers before theatrically pushing them to the floor.
Such claims are rare and precious in the Catholic Church, which requires a thorough investigation including interviews with any witnesses and all relevant medical documents.
There is then a series of tests that the case must pass, beginning with analysis by the Congregation’s panel of medical experts, the consulta medica, before rounds of voting on the validity of the miracle.
If it is passed by the consulta medica, the case goes to the Theological Consultors, who consider the spiritual dimension of the claim. A verdict that concludes there has been a direct link between healing and the invocation of a “servant of God” is passed to cardinals and bishops for another vote, before the case finally reaches the Pope.
Although Sullivan’s case took eight years to complete, it was aided by the fact that doctors who treated him were plain baffled by his recovery.
Referring to his improvement the first time he prayed to Newman, Dr Robert Banco, chief of spinal surgery at the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, wrote: “Because of this persisting and severe stenosis, I have no medical explanation for why he was pain-free and for so long a time. The objective data, CT, myelogram, and MRI demonstrated that his pathology did not at all change, but his symptoms [pain] improved drastically.”
After the second healing, he told Sullivan that the recovery to his spine was so complete that the 71 year-old now had the lifting capacity of a 30 year-old. “With the tear in your dura mater, your condition should have been much worse,” he said. “I have no medical or scientific answer for you. If you want an answer, ask God.”
While Dr Banco was willing to testify at the tribunal investigating what had happened, Sullivan says that his wife, Carol, was initially reluctant.
“She didn’t believe it at first,” he says. “She thought there must be some explanation. 'You must heal fast,’ she said to me. But she realised after the second event that it was definitely a miracle.”
Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship and a former surgeon, stresses that claims of miracles should be treated with caution, but says that as a scientist with a faith, he would not rule them out.
“It is hard to say whether it [Jack Sullivan’s cure] is inexplicable enough to be declared a miracle. I believe God can do anything He likes. I don’t think there must always be a natural explanation.
“I can’t exclude the possibility of a divine footprint, but as a I scientist I would want to see the evidence.”
Others are not so open to such a possibility. “Show me the pictures,” says Jonathan Lucas, a consultant spinal surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital, London.
“I just don’t believe it. I’m very sceptical about the idea of miracles. Spinal surgeons often pray to God because the risks are very high. If you get it wrong, you can cause catastrophic damage and potentially paralyse. But I think it was just a lucky day at the office for these surgeons.”
According to Mr Lucas, the spinal problems suffered by Sullivan can occur in about 3 per cent of adults. He admits that a period of recovery would be expected following complications during surgery, but said that if the operation had gone well he should have been able to walk within days.
While he has not seen the medical documents that were presented to the Vatican’s medical council, his comments are likely to be shared by many who see such beliefs as an anachronistic relic from the Middle Ages.
However, Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, argues that we shouldn’t rush to be so dismissive. “Atheists who mock miracles frequently miss that they actually tell us something interesting about human beings,” he says. “They aren’t merely nonsense. They tell us that someone is struggling with something big, that they have been subject to an intolerable strain that has led them to this belief. There are moments when reality is so bleak that we want and need it to be a miracle.”
He continues: “The belief in miracles tends to be the province of desperate people. They are either very short of money or very ill.”
Yet de Botton suggests that all of us believe in miracles to some degree, whether it’s finding that cancer has vanished or wanting to believe that a loved one hasn’t died.
Rather than scorn Catholics who hold to this view, he says that there is something admirable about such faith.
“Anglican tradition has downplayed miracles. Ever since the Enlightenment, it is something they have found very embarrassing, whereas for Catholics it is mainstream.”
He says that in some ways the belief in miracles, such as the cure of Jack Sullivan, should not come as such a surprise. “They are nothing next to the miracle that is at the heart of Christianity, the belief that Jesus is the son of God.”
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No, I don't know everything. I'm just here to share my experience. |
Edited by - balto on 02/08/2013 20:22:03 |
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All1Spirit
USA
149 Posts |
Posted - 02/08/2013 : 20:43:07
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My bias is that many groups have claimed the supernatural for thousands of years to gain adherents. Still I am not God and have no idea what is true or not.
The miracles I am most in awe of are the ones we pass by every day – millions of them. The sun always comes up at an exact time,tiny seeds grow into huge trees and bees fly when science says the cant. We take so much for granted that if we really look around the handy work of a great mystery is everywhere.
Around and Around the Circle We Go....
The Answer Sits In The Middle and Knows... |
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balto
839 Posts |
Posted - 02/08/2013 : 20:49:41
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another article on this story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11186584
I really think it is just a case of "power of belief".
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No, I don't know everything. I'm just here to share my experience. |
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balto
839 Posts |
Posted - 02/08/2013 : 21:06:18
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Faith Healing For Skeptics: How the Expectant Brain Relieves Pain
by Rick Heller
November 10, 2011
Although skeptics have long rejected faith healing, recent research suggests it may have some medical standing. "Believing in a Higher Power—even a fictional one—can cure ills amenable to the placebo response. Yet with the right approach, even skeptics can take advantage of placebo mechanisms," the author writes. Credit: Creative Commons/Isaac Paris.
After visiting the Roman Catholic shrine in Lourdes, upon seeing the collection of discarded crutches that testified to the shrine’s curative powers, a traveling companion remarked to the writer Anatole France, “One wooden leg would be more to the point.” This anecdote is a favorite of skeptics who disbelieve stories of faith healing. Yet such faith persists. In September, 2009, for instance, Pope Benedict XVI approved the claim that a Boston man was “miraculously cured” of back pain after praying to Cardinal John Henry Newman, a British theologian who died in 1890.
Are those who seek faith healing deluded? Not entirely. Although no amount of faith can regenerate a lost limb, faith can indeed help a person overcome crippling pain. The natural brain mechanisms that allow this to occur are increasingly understood. Believing in a Higher Power—even a fictional one—can cure ills amenable to the placebo response. Yet with the right approach, even skeptics can take advantage of placebo mechanisms.
Contrary to the notion that a placebo is “nothing,” placebos have been shown to have a significant effect on pain, depression, and Parkinson’s disease, all of which are conditions of the brain’s motivational circuitry. Placebo effects have been reported but are less well-established in the treatment of other conditions such as alcoholism. Twelve-step programs call for belief in a Higher Power, but are liberal as to what it can be; as Nicholas Grant Boeving notes, even a doorknob can fit the bill. This Higher Power is clearly some kind of fictive device that gets the action rolling, like the statue that serves as a “MacGuffin” in The Maltese Falcon, or like a placebo.
The best-understood placebo response is the one that relieves pain. This response is a feature of the brain’s “reward system,” the part of the nervous system that drives us to achieve goals. Pain is a signal that interrupts this system and tells us to stop and pay attention. Both pain and reward make use of a common currency—the body’s internal opioids—that both relieve pain and induce pleasure. Another aspect of the reward system is habits, which serve as a kind of an automatic pilot for actions proven so rewarding we don’t need to analyze them anymore.
Narcotics, in fact, hijack the reward system by mimicking the body’s natural opioids. An addiction is a very strong habit. When one is addicted, one can’t easily choose to do otherwise. Thus, it’s wiser to think of addiction as a disease rather than a moral failing. Yet addictions are less hard-wired than genetic disorders. To use a technical term, addictions are the result of “neuroplastic” changes to the brain’s wiring that are enduring but not necessarily impossible to reverse.
In the 1970s, when internal opioids were first identified, the neurologist Howard Fields and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco showed that the placebo effect on pain disappeared when patients received an opioid-blocking drug. In a recent lecture at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Fields, slim and with a full head of gray hair, spoke about the interplay between pleasure and pain. “A placebo actually is the anticipation of reward, because the anticipation of pain relief is a reward,” Fields said. The amount of pain we feel is altered by computations in the reward system a half-second before pain reaches consciousness. “There’s a big opioid release in the nucleus accumbens with the anticipation of reward,” Fields said. “It’s biasing the system.”
According to Italian researcher Fabrizio Benedetti, injecting a placebo saline solution in full view of the patient has the same punch as providing 6–8 mg of morphine—a significant dose—through an IV line without the patient’s knowledge. Even “real” drugs, such as narcotics, are amplified by the placebo response. “When you administer an agent or a treatment openly, the effect that it has is doubled—the effect of the active treatment and then the effect of the expectation,” University of Michigan psychiatrist Jon-Kar Zubieta told me. “Both come together. Morphine has a huge effect like that.”
Zubieta’s research shows that when people respond to placebos, elevated levels of internal opioids spread from the reward system to brain areas that regulate pain. So although faith can’t regenerate limbs, there’s a clear biological mechanism to go with the anecdotal and statistical evidence that faith reduces pain.
The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, overcame a debilitating physical injury through her faith. When people of faith, the author writes, "are inspired by the Bible, a shaman, or even a back surgeon to expect recovery, that shift in expectations can restore them to their natural pain-free state." Credit: Creative Commons/Sue Clark.
The healing by prayer of the future founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, bears evidence of this type of cure. Immobilized after a fall on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Mass. in February, 1866, she was inspired by an account of Jesus healing the infirm to rise from her sickbed and walk.
It may seem puzzling that faith can have a long-lasting healing effect. Elevated moods do not last forever. However, faith can permanently relieve pain when the pain is itself the product of false beliefs. A nocebo—sometimes called the placebo’s “evil twin”—is an inert substance or procedure that makes a person feel worse via the power of suggestion. Ironically, when participants in clinical trials receive placebos, they sometimes come down with the side effects listed on the warning label of the real pharmaceutical. Among the recorded “side effects” of placebos are burning and flushing, chills, diarrhea, drowsiness, dry mouth, insomnia, nausea and numbness.
Jon-Kar Zubieta has found that subjects who experience elevated pain due to a nocebo response have reduced opioid transmission in their reward system. That is, just as positive expectations raise internal opioid levels, pessimism lowers them.
When nervous people like Mary Baker Eddy anticipate the worst, their negative expectations can become a self-fulfilling and enduring prophecy. But when they are inspired by the Bible, a shaman, or even a back surgeon to expect recovery, that shift in expectations can restore them to their natural pain-free state. Faith is a nocebo-buster.
I had my own powerful nocebo experience when I was in my twenties. Over a period of eight years, increasingly intense eyestrain made it difficult for me to work—to the point where I applied to be certified as visually handicapped. I saw eye doctors—including one who suggested it was psychosomatic, a diagnosis I rejected indignantly. Finally, I was referred to an ophthalmology specialist at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School. He told me that my eyes were fine, but that I’d become hypersensitive to minor eye sensations. A thought struck me. My overprotective mother (a graduate of Philip Roth’s Weequahic High School in Newark) had frequently warned me about reading too much, even shrieking, “Stop reading. You’ll be blind by the time you’re thirty.” I was nearing thirty and imagined I was going blind. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My eye pain faded over the next 48 hours, and I was able to function normally again. It felt like a miracle—like I was born again—and if it had happened at Lourdes rather than UCSF, I might be Roman Catholic today. Was it a coincidence that my healing occurred at UCSF, where Howard Fields’ research demonstrated that placebo analgesia was due to internal opioids? No, I suspect the physicians there were in general well-informed about the impact of beliefs on pain.
Modern, secular people may be too sophisticated to believe religious fictions that produce placebo analgesia. However, even highly educated people can hold secular fictions that make life painful, and we can undo those by applying our critical faculties. In a 2000 book, the late Patrick Wall, a leading figure in pain research, wrote that no more that 15 percent of patients who seek treatment for back pain have an identifiable physical condition. “This leaves 85 percent with no apparent cause,” he wrote. Many back specialists now believe a nocebo response is responsible for much unexplained back pain, which also explains why dubious treatments can cure it. For instance, in January 2010, a back specialist wrote in a medical journal that he would continue to inject liquid cement into the spine of certain back-pain patients, even though studies show it provides no more benefit than a sham procedure that mimics it—because both the real and placebo procedures provide long-term pain relief.
Because false expectations can cause physical pain, cognitive behavioral therapy, which aims to dispel false beliefs, can act as anti-nocebo therapy for pain. Timothy Wallace, a clinical psychologist at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, works with patients to correct their distorted beliefs about pain. “Pain is more than just something going on wrong inside your body,” he told me. “It’s all about expectations and past history and your thinking about pain.”
Ronald Siegel is a psychologist on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School and coauthor of the book Back Sense. With regard to treating back pain, he said that shifting a client’s expectations in a positive direction is a key element whether the treatment is surgery, psychotherapy, or alternative treatments such as chiropractic or acupuncture. “Talking about back pain for the moment—anything that will make a person believe that they have found a successful treatment will be very, very helpful in alleviating pain,” he said. Before trying to psych out pain, however, one should consult a physician to get a correct diagnosis. “You don’t want to psychoanalyze a brain tumor,” Siegel said.
A stumbling block to the use of psychotherapy in the treatment of nocebos is the oversold notion that psychosomatic illness is the result of “secondary gain.” This is the idea that people become sick because they have a desire, perhaps unconscious, to be catered to as an invalid. There is no reason to posit such florid motivations for these illnesses; negative expectations—perhaps due to an innocent error—can depress opioids and amplify pain. When I related my story to Arthur Barsky, the vice chair for psychiatric research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, he downplayed motives of secondary gain in conditions like mine. “For many of these patients, they’re not getting anything out of it. It’s miserable,” he said. “It’s not a way of manipulating other people or getting some gain that you couldn’t get any another way.”
I don’t mean to reduce the balm of religion solely to the placebo response. For instance, the ideas that “things happen for a reason” or that tragedies are “God’s will” are forms of cognitive reappraisal. When we reappraise, prefrontal areas of the brain inhibit pain-related activity in the cingulate cortex. Meditation and mindfulness are being studied in laboratories as ways of reducing suffering. Even religious art and music that inspire, and secular versions of the same, can reduce pain.
The endurance of religion in the modern age may have something to do with its analgesic properties. Those of us who are too skeptical to resort to faith healing can at least debunk our nocebos. We can apply skepticism toward our own bodies, and challenge false beliefs that cause us pain. Nocebos can happen to anyone—in his research, Zubieta has yet to uncover a personality trait that makes someone significantly more susceptible to them. After all, who doesn’t have some false beliefs? Indeed, people who are certain that all their beliefs are true may be the ones most deluded. Faith can work miracles by way of the brain’s reward system. Judicious use of skepticism, when applied to unjustified fears and excessive pessimism, can heal us too.
Rick Heller is the editor of the online magazine, the New Humanism, a publication of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Free Inquiry, UUWorld, Buddhadharma, and in the Boston Globe and Lowell Sun. He has recently created Seeing The Roses, a program to promote sustainable living through mindfulness.
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No, I don't know everything. I'm just here to share my experience. |
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cakeflowfatt
28 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2013 : 21:22:39
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Interesting articles
I like to say
Don't mess with a man's religion... |
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gigalos
Netherlands
310 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2013 : 04:13:20
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I like to add a few statements of my neighbour. Not trying to make nasty or hostile comments, I only show a couple of slightly entertaining points of view of believers and non-believers when it comes to miracles. I once and a while wish I was a blind believer though, as it makes life easier sometimes.
"It was a cold winter and I couldn't start my car for ten minutes. My sister-in-law, who is a blind believer in God, got out and started praying... I laughed but tried the ignition switch and... it started. The whole trip I was trying to convince her that if a car does not start at once, it is not rare to see it ignite some time later if you just keep trying ... she stayed convinced it was God though"
"When I had one of my usual arguments about the existence of a God with my sister-in-law, she came up with Lourdes and the fact that there are numerous cruches at the walls from people who left them behind. I felt I won the argument that day by saying: "I agree that people stood up and could walk their way home, but I've never heard of somebody leaving behind a wooden leg". |
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Power of prayer or miracles?
